Linda Nochlin

Art historian who helped elevate women artists to ‘greatness’

Linda Nochlin, a celebrated art historian whose feminist approach permanently altered her field, died on Sunday at her home in New York City. She was 86.

Her family said the cause was cancer. At her death she was the Lila Acheson Wallach Professor of Modern Art emerita at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

Nochlin earned a place of honour in both art historical and art world circles in January 1971 with a groundbreaking essay whose very title, “Why Are There So Few Great Women Artists?,” threw down a gauntlet. She examined assumptions behind the question, enumerated the centuries of institutional and social conventions that had militated against women succeeding in the arts and discredited what she called the myth of innate genius.

Her inquiry provided several generations of art historians, critics and artists alike with new tools to address issues of gender and identity in art. It also helped initiate a collective, and continuing, rewriting of art history.

In the process, not a few female artists have been recognised as great, as the very idea of greatness has been redefined and the conception of art expanded to include the so-called crafts. In 2001, the 30th anniversary of the article’s publication was celebrated with a symposium at Princeton University.

Nochlin went on to write extensively on feminist matters in the arts while pursuing a career that was unusual in its breadth, powered by an almost evangelical sense of urgency and a certain flexibility in artistic taste. She organised exhibitions, wrote catalogue essays, reviewed contemporary art shows, and taught and lectured widely.

In the classroom or at a lectern, Nochlin cut a striking figure. A voluble, feisty woman who loved designer clothes and prominent jewellery, she was known for her sharp retorts, humour-laced charm, fierce intelligence and indefatigable work habits. Along the way she amassed a distinguished roster of former students, many of them women, who work in universities and museums around the world.

As comfortable with 19thas with 20th-century art, Nochlin was always alert to the overlooked and underrecognised. Her first important books were Realism (1971) and Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (1976), which grew out of her doctoral dissertation. They appeared at a time when 19th-century French painting usually meant impressionism and post-impressionism (although she wrote on those subjects, too).

“Linda was important as both a scholar and a critic, but beyond that her work had an unusual real-world impact,” said Elizabeth C Baker, who as an editor in the 1960s was the first to invite Nochlin to write for Artnews.

Nochlin’s ability to toggle between past and present was aided by her clear, accessible writing, which was built on theory but never deadened by it. Her tone was brisk and irreverent, her ideas coming out in pithy, manageable chunks, making her work a perennial favourite with students.

Beyond her interest in art’s social and political contexts and meanings, Nochlin was keenly attentive to art objects, especially the surfaces of paintings. She once described herself as “an aesthetic creature to my fingertips”

She was born Linda Natalie Weinberg on 30 January 1931 in Brooklyn and grew up in Crown Heights as a member of a wealthy extended family. Her father, Jules Weinberg, helped run his family’s newspaper distribution business. Her mother, the former Elka Heller, passed her serious cultural enthusiasms – including literature, dance, music and theatre – to Linda, her precocious only child.

Linda became a voracious reader who adored Bach and the Brooklyn Museum and saw the choreography of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham while still in high school. As she told Richard Candida Smith in an oral history for the Archives of American Art, her family of secular Jews was both left-leaning and materially comfortable, with a yacht, servants and houses in Florida.

“Roosevelt was as far right as people were willing to go,” she said of her parents’ circle, adding that she grew up thinking “all radicals were rich”.

Her uncle, Robert Heller, who worked at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, had Communist affiliations and moved to London during the Mccarthy era. There he became a prominent producer of television shows, including Kenneth Clark’s celebrated series Civilisation.

After high school, Nochlin attended Vassar College, graduating in 1951 with a major in philosophy and double minor in Greek and art history. She went on to earn a master’s degree in 17th-century English literature at Columbia University.

She taught at Vassar until 1979, and twice married colleagues. Her first husband was Philip H Nochlin, a young professor of philosophy, who died in 1960. In 1968 she married Richard Pommer, an architectural historian, who died in 1992.

She also taught at the Graduate Center in Manhattan; Stanford University, Williams College and Yale University. She joined the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts in 1980, retiring in 2013.

Nochlin learned she had cancer in the late 1990s, but she rarely let it slow her down. She worked almost to the end, recently finishing a book, Misère: Representations of Misery in 19th-century Art, which is to be published in March.

Nochlin is survived by daughters Jessica Trotta and Daisy Pommer, and two grandchildren.

“Linda was important as both a scholar and a critic, but beyond that her work had an unusual real world impact”